Loose Ends
by Music Intuition
Summary: When someone is cut out of your life for the last time, there are bound to be loose ends and scattered pieces. - Rangiku Matsumoto & Izuru Kira.


_**Author's Note**__: After the time skip, both Izuru and Rangiku have short hair. Here's one idea of how they got there. Implied Ginran and Ginkira._

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**Loose Ends**

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"Are you ready?"

He nods. He turns away, before meeting her eyes, blue on blue. Sky on sea. "Yeah."

There is a scarf on the floor between them. A scarf and a pair of scissors and two lieutenants' badges. A mirror. Also a bottle of sake, since that was the only way either of them could work up the nerve to do this.

She hands him the scissors and he accepts them, white knuckles clenching fierce and fearful around the blades. Then he raises his hand and seeks the first of her waves, breathing deep and searching for her permission.

"Past the chin," Rangiku says. "No, not there. Shorter."

Izuru obliges her.

As each bundle of honey hair falls into the scarf, she remembers pale hands, paler than those mechanically working now. She remembers a time with her hair even shorter than it is becoming, when those hands brushed it until it shined. Gold over silver. Spider fingers clasping a platinum necklace around her neck. A birthday present, he had said, but no jewelry or gemstone could match his first present to her.

She remembers sharing the pink scarf with him during the winters. Plucking persimmons from the highest branches, sailing through the air on his shoulders. Laughing on the banks of a stream made of sewage, its stench like the sweetness of cherry blossoms.

She remembers strange bruises on her arms and thighs and neck, bruises she couldn't understand. Bruises with no source. And yet, she found herself hiding them beneath her blanket. Hiding them from him and from herself.

She remembers lips that would smile, thin lips pressed to her cheek. Lips that would smile, smile and lie. Bare feet plodding through the snow. Irises as blue as a summer's day as he told her that he would make sure she never had to cry again. Lips that lie and eyes that cry. Tears that fell from her eyes and his eyes and melted the snow. An outstretched hand to catch them. A hand that was just as cold, just as white as the snow.

She remembers how pieces of his hair still clung to her scarf on her first day at the Academy. She remembers seeing him just once, just once before he looked away and disappeared yet again.

The final curl falls, just as her own tears once fell on the face of a man she hated to love and loved to hate. Her hair rustles around her ears, and she smiles for all her melancholy.

"Your turn," she tells Izuru,

His face reads as one betrayed, but the scissors are hers. She smears his hair gently with saliva to keep it from springing back, then scolds him when he winces.

For all he has tried to forget, the snipping scissors sound like the singeing of Shinsou. As if a former captain stands right there at his ear and whispers cold breezes, little nothings that make the hair on the back of his neck stand at attention. It is warm today, but Izuru still shivers beneath his shihakusho.

He remembers flared nostrils, an absurdly wide smile. Eyes that only opened in supreme anger. Eyes that always seemed to follow him. Eyes that still follow him, even now.

He remembers wrists as thin as a zanpakutou. Fragile, brittle - deceptively strong, beneath those wide sleeves. The contrast in skin color brought Izuru's own cheeks to life, even as blood drained from them in fear. Wrists flat against his hair as fingers brushed his collarbone and windpipe, just a glance, just enough. A reminder that Izuru is his, his lieutenant, his follower. Hollow sentiments, but real enough all the same, because Izuru remembers.

He remembers elbows, overly pointy elbows pressed into his back. Those were days when Izuru still smiled, looking over his shoulder for an overly enthusiastic captain who enjoyed surprises. He remembers dodging surprise after surprise, each more elaborate than the next, until he began to wonder who was really in charge here.

He remembers legs wrapping mercilessly around his own and leaving no doubt who commanded who.

"Not that part," he says. "Leave the fringe."

"All of it?" Rangiku is pouting, and her fingers against his ear pull him back. "But it's so awful!"

He also remembers his captain's words like stones disguised as feathers, so he compromises, if only to silence her. Rangiku was also his captain's student, he reminds himself. A student in the art of manipulation, of misdirection.

As shards of hair litter the ground between them, he remembers blood, so much blood. Blood that he knew had been spilled by his captain, but a loyalty he refused to betray. A chase. A misleading word, a false step. A fight with Rangiku. A crack in the wall, and the shattering of his composure.

Not a tear when he realized that he'd been used, that he'd been the fool all along. Not a one.

Izuru is still for several moments before he realizes that Rangiku has finished. "Hard memories, huh?" she asks, and he knows that she knows. But she is brushing the clumps of golden and platinum hair into the grass. She is dusting off her scarf. She is laughing, brushing back the hair that remains, peering into a mirror.

She is moving on.

But she still sits with Izuru until the sun is long gone, tossing up pieces of torn grass as they stare at the stars. They don't speak. They don't have to.

When someone is cut out of your life for the last time, there are bound to be loose ends and scattered pieces.


End file.
